Protecting Your Landscape

We advise our clients to call us in before they do any major yard work, and that’s really what we try to do to separate in ourselves from some of the other tree companies around that just come out and cut trees. Probably 90% of the work we do is cutting wood in some fashion, whether it’s pruning or removing, or grinding stumps, but there’s a purpose behind what we do. It’s not just going out there cutting trees because somebody is paying you to take wood out of their trees.

Pruning is done to remove dead and broken limbs. We need to think out the canopies, and sometimes we have to rope out the limbs. Quite often we’ll rope them out because there are well landscaped yards below us that we must not damage with a 200-300 pound limb. We have a lot of irrigation systems below us as well. They could get torn up by limbs hitting the ground. So, we take the necessary precautions to prevent the damage from occurring.

We work very diligently at protecting all that plant material underneath the trees. In some areas, we have to lay tarps over the shrubs, but in other areas we have to put down what are called alternamats and plywood to protect turf from excessive trampling. They had a flagstone patio, so we had to put down plywood. We lay down matting on the ground beneath the tree. It’s almost like doing surgery in an emergency room, where you have a victim that’s got metal and glass in his body, and you’ve got to pull that stuff out without doing any more damage.

We lay down a roadway for the tree to drop on. We cover that roadway in plywood, then we put 2 layers of truck tires, so that when the log hits (the log is about 20,000 pounds) it bounces and lands, cushioned, onto the backyard.

Once our guys cut up all the wood and haul it out, there is absolutely no depression and no mark left in the yard. They clean up all the sawdust, pick up the tires, the plywood, and the alternamats, and take a blower to the grass to fluff it up. It looks like we’d never been there.